after death for themselves and for those they loved was slipping from them, and that the loss was fraught with anguish and despair. It is important to recognize that this craving for a support for the belief in personal survival has not merely underlain the acceptance of spiritualism by large numbers of men and women, here and in America, but was directly responsible for the organization of psychical research upon scientific lines. Though the research itself has, for the most part, been conducted in a seriously scientific spirit, which seeks to banish prejudice and to apply the sternest tests of evidence, it must not be forgotten that the desire to ascertain whether positive proofs of spiritual survival could not be found was a chief motive of the founders of the study. Certainly the leading investigators have shown, both in their researches and in the controversies to which they have given rise, a singularly high standard of intellectual integrity, setting, in this regard, an excellent example to modern controversialists in some of the "exacter" sciences. But we doubt whether they have realized the havoc which so powerful an interest is capable of making in processes of reasoning so delicately subjective as most of those upon which they have to engage.

Two works before us, both able and lucid expositions of the positive achievements of modern psychical research "A New World of Thought," by Professor Barrett (Kegan Paul), and "Occultism and Common Sense," by Beccles Willson (Werner Laurie) seem to illustrate this inherent defect of their science. So long as the researcher keeps within the wonderland of psychology, dealing with mesmerism, trance, hypnotism, and thought-transference, he is sufficiently remote from the central craving to preserve a sane judgment upon the worth of evidence. In those fields psychical research has

made genuinely scientific progress, though much deceit and error have grown up with it. The evidence of double or alternating personality, stores of sub-conscious knowledge, and direct psychical communications among the living, is so strong and various as to convince open-minded readers of the existence of many unsuspected powers in the mind of man. Though the evidence of clairvoyance, and of what are termed the "psychical phenomena❞ of séances, such as rappings, the raising of bodies, &c., involves some radical changes in our conception of the material world, these changes are not really more wonderful than those involved in such modern miracles as wireless telegraphy or x-rays. No one doubts that matter, as well as mind, contains such powers as yet unused or undiscovered. We do not know that we are yet prepared to give full acceptance to the case of Mr. Home floating midair between the windows of two adjoining houses. As a guess we would rather set down such cases to collective hypnotism. But our intellectual constitution would not be wrecked if such "interference" with the law of gravitation were proved to be possible. Of thought-reading, the direct imposition of thoughts and feelings by one mind upon another, access to knowledge forgotten, or only known to lower centres of consciousness, involving, perhaps, the notion of a universe vibrating with psychic as with physical energy, there exists a large amount of substantially sound evidence.

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But when we are invited to pass from such enlargements of ordinary knowledge to the acceptance of premonitory dreams, disclosures of past occurrences known to no one, and the appearance of disembodied spirits, we are impelled to pause and contemplate the chasm which separates these phenomena from the others we have just described. How future events can be

ropean languages up to a point, and perfectly as far as blasphemy or as obscenity was concerned, and his quick ear enabled him as if by magic to ascertain the nationality of any European passer-by, if ever he had spoken to the man before, and to salute him in his mother tongue.

All day he sat, amused and cheerful, in the sun. Half faun, half satyr, his blindness kept him from entire materialism, giving him sometimes a halfspiritual air, which possibly may have been but skin deep, and of the nature of the reflection of a sunset on a dunghill; or again, may possibly have been the true reflection of his soul as it peeped through the dunghill of the flesh.

As people passed along the road, their horses slithering and sliding on the sharp pitch of the paved road, which dips straight down from underneath the mounting-block of the hotel, between the tapia walls, over which Bougainvilleas peep, down to the Soko Grande, El Rubio would hail them, as if he had been a dark lighthouse, set up to guide their steps.

By one of the strange contradictions, which Nature seems to take delight in just to confound us, when after a few thousand years of study we think we know her ways, the Rubio had a love of horses which in him replaced the usual love of music of the blind. No one could hold two or three fighting stallions better, and few Moors in all the place were bolder riders-that is, on roads he knew. Along the steep and twisting path that leads towards Spartel he used to ride full speed and shouting "Balak" when he was sent upon a message or with a horse from town out to the villas on the hill. All those who knew him left him a free road, and if he met a herd of cattle or of sheep the horse would pick his way through them, twisting and turning of his own accord, whilst his blind

rider left the reins upon his neck and galloped furiously. In what dark lane or evil-smelling hole he lived no European knew. Always well dressed and clean, he lived apart both from the Moors and from the Europeans, and in a way from all humanity, passing his time, as does a lizard, in the sun and in the evening disappearing to his den. The missions of the various true faiths, Catholic, Presbyterian, and Anglican, had tackled him in vain. Whether it was that none of them had anything to offer which he thought better than the cheerful optimism with which he was endowed by nature to fight the darkness of the world he lived in, is difficult to say. Still, they had all been worsted; not that the subject of their spiritual blandishments could have been termed a strict Mohammedan, for he drank any kind of spirits that was presented to him by Christians, anxious perhaps to make him break the spirit if they were impotent to move him in the letter of his law. Still though he sat with nothing seemingly reflected on the retina of his opaque and porcelain-colored eyes, his interior vision was as keen or keener than that of other men. He never seemed a man apart, or cut off from his fellows, but had his place in life, just as throughout the East the poorest and most miserable appear to have, not barred out from mankind by mere externals as are their brethren in the North, shut in the ice of charity, as bees are shut behind a plate of glass so that the rich may watch their movements in the hive.

Up from the Arab market over which he sat, as it were, presiding in his darkness, just as God seems to sit, presiding blindly, over a world which either mocks him, or is mocked at by him, there came a breath of Eastern life, bearing a scent compounded of the acrid sweat of men, dried camel's dung, of mouldering charcoal fires, of spices,

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gunpowder, and of a thousand simples, all brought together by mere chance or fate, a sort of incense burned in his honor and agreeable to his soul. seemed to bring him life, and put him into touch with all he could not see, but yet could feel, almost as well as if he saw just as did other men.

Sniffing it up, his nostrils would dilate, and then occasionally a shadow ran across his freckled face, and as he ran his hands down the fore legs of the horse left in his charge, marking acutely any splint or spavin they might have, he used to mutter, half in a resigned, half in an irritated way, “Mektub," the sole profession of his faith that he was ever heard to make, for if a thing is written down by fate, it follows naturally that there is somebody who writes, if only foolishly. Whether the mystic phrase of resignation referred to his condition or to the possible splint upon the horse's leg, no one could tell, but as the shadow passed away, as quickly as it came, he soon fell back again into the half-resigned good humor of the blind, which, like the dancer's lithographic smile, seems quite involuntary.

Years melted into one another, and time sauntered by, just as it always must have sauntered in the town where hours are weeks, weeks months, and months whole years, and still the hum of animals and men rose from the Arab market, and still the shadows in the evening creeping on the sand seemed something tangible to the blind watcher on his stone. Not that he cared for time, or even marked its flight, or would have cared to mark it, had it been pointed out to him, for life was pleasant, the springs of charity unfailing, wit ever present in his brain, and someone always had a horse to hold, to which he talked, as it stood blinking in the sun. His blindness did not seem to trouble him, and if he thought of it at all, he looked on it

as part and parcel of the scheme of nature, against which it is impious to contend. Doctors had peered into his eyes with lenses, quarrelled with one another on their diagnoses of his case, and still the Rubio sat contented, questioning nothing, and enduring everything, sun, rain, wind, flies, and dust, as patiently as he were a rock. Nothing was further from his thoughts than that he ever once again could see. Plainly, it had been written in the books of fate he should be blind, and so when European doctors talked to him of operations and the like he smiled, not wishing to offend, and never doubting of their learning, for had not one of them cured a relation of his own of intermittent fever by the use of some white magic powder, when native doctors after having burned him with a red-hot iron, and made him take texts of the Koran steeped in water, had ignominiously failed?

All that they said did not appeal to him, for all of them were serious men, who talked the matter over gravely, and looked on him as something curious on which to exercise their skill. All might have gone on in the same old way, and to this day the Rubio still sat on his stone without a wish to see the horses that he held, the sunlight falling white upon the towers, or the red glare upon the Spanish coast at eventide, had not a German scientist appeared.

From the first day on which the Rubio held the doctor's horse a fellowship sprang up between them, not easy to explain. No single word of Arabic the doctor spoke, and all the German that the Rubio knew was either objurgatory or obscene, and yet the men were friends. Tall and uncouth and with a beard that looked as if it never had been combed, his trousers short and frayed and with an inch or two of dirty sock showing between them and his shoes, dressed in a yellowish alpaca

jacket, and a white solar topee lined with green, the doctor peered out on the world through neutral tinted glasses, for his own eyes were weak.

Whether this weakness drew him to the blind, or if he liked to hear the Rubio's tales about the Europeans he had known, to all of whom he gave the worst

of characters, calling them drunkards and hinting at dark vices which he averred they practised to a man-not that he for a moment believed a single word he uttered, but thought apparently his statements gave a piquancy to conversation-the doctor Dever said. Soon Tangier knew him for a character, and as he stumbled on his horse about the town, curing the Arabs of ophthalmia and gathering facts for the enormous book he said he meant to write upon North Africa, his reputation grew. The natives christened him "Father of Blindness," which name appeared to him a compliment, and he would use it, speaking of himself, complacently, just as a Scotsman likes to be spoken of under the style and title of the land he owns, although it be all bog. Though in the little world of men in which he lived the doctor was a fool, in the large field of science, he was competent enough, and when he proved to demonstration to the other doctors in the place that a slight operation would restore the Rubio's sight, they all fell in with it, and though for years the object of their care had held their horses and they had seen him every day, without observing him, he now became of interest, just as a moth becomes of interest when it is dead and put into a case with other specimens.

Whether the sympathy that certainly exists between wise men and those whose intellect is rudimentary, and which is rarely manifested between a learned and an ordinary man, prevailed upon the Rubio to submit himself to the ministrations of the German

man of science, Allah alone can tell. A season saw the mounting-block deserted, and tourists gave their horses to be held by boys, who tied them by the reins to rings high in the wall, and fell asleep, leaving the animals to fight and break their bridles, and for a time no stream of cheerful blasphemy was heard, in any European tongue, from the usual guardian of the stone. In a clean unaccustomed bed in a dark corner of Hope House, the missionary hospital, the Rubio lay, his head bound up in bandages, silent, but cheerful, confident in the skill of his strange friend, but yet incredulous, after the Arab way.

During the long six weeks, what were his thoughts and expectations it is difficult to say. Perhaps they ran upon the wonders of the new world he would inherit with his sight, perhaps he rather dreaded to behold all that he knew so well and so familiarly by touch. He who, when like a lizard he had basked against his wall, had never for a moment ceased from talkIng, now was silent, and when the doctor visited him, to dress his eyes, and make his daily diagnosis of the case, answered to all the words of hope he heard, "It will be as God wishes it to be," and turned uneasily between his unfamiliar sheets. At last the day arrived when the doctors judged the necessary time had passed. No one in Tangier was more confident than was "the Father of Blindness," who went and came about the town buoyed high with expectation, for he was really a kind-hearted man, learned but simple, after the fashion of his kind.

At early morning all was ready, and in the presence of the assembled doctors of the place, with infinite precaution the dressings were removed. Cautiously and by degrees, a little light was let into the room. Holding his patient's hand and visibly moved, the German asked him if he saw. "Not